October Articles Online
Bonus Articles
from the Digital Archive
|
Beyond the Blues and Back Again
The difference between opinion and experience
Depression, like love, is an overused word. “I love my wife”; I love what
AA has done for me”; I love chocolate.” It’s the context
that makes the meaning of “love” clear, and surely you
understand that I feel differently about my wife than I feel about
chocolate. Yet the word “love” is the same word in all these
phrases.
The word “depression” has many different
meanings, too, so when we talk about depression at an AA meeting, we
aren’t all talking about the same thing. “My dad just passed
away, and I’m so depressed”; “I haven’t had a
girlfriend in four months, and I’m so depressed”; “My
team didn’t make the playoffs, and I’m so depressed.”
When I was a newcomer in AA in 1993, I didn’t
have any of the feelings that the words “love” and
“depressed” might describe. There were a lot of other feelings
I didn’t have, either. I had a head full of racing thoughts, but,
emotionally, I was a zombie. I hadn’t cried or laughed, been angry,
happy, or sad in a long time. I had feelings of self-loathing and
hopelessness, and that was about it. Suicide seemed like the only
alternative.
By age fifteen, I was one year into a two-year period
of voluntary abstinence from alcohol. I was already frightened by the
person I became when I drank, and I hadn’t yet discovered street
drugs. By seventeen, I picked up alcohol again, but a year later friends
were telling me I shouldn’t drink. They didn’t like the person
I became when I drank, either. They suggested I stick to pot. At that point
in my drinking, I still cared enough about having friends to make the
sacrifice and not drink, except for a dozen times or so during the last
year. But I couldn’t tolerate physical sobriety, so I did marijuana
and other street drugs all the time.
When I was nineteen, a
friend encouraged me to see a psychiatrist. I went, if only to make my
friends like me better. The psychiatrist immediately diagnosed me as
depressed; she wanted to see me regularly and put me on antidepressant
medication. However, she said I had to be sober first. Hmm . . . I said
I’d come back in six weeks, after Christmas and New Year’s.
Maybe you can guess that I didn’t go back. I just didn’t see
what drugs and alcohol had to do with any of my problems.
I was twenty years old and a newcomer in AA when I went
to see another psychiatrist. Again, I was diagnosed as depressed; he wanted
to put me on medication and said I would have to be sober. This time I was
in AA, and this time I could be sober, even if it was just one day at a
time. I had been in AA less than three months the day I started
antidepressant medication. Thank God for AA and thank God for that doctor.
Without either one of them, I wouldn’t have lived to see 1994.
There’s not space here for me to relate the
series of events in childhood that transformed me into a depressed little
boy. I will quickly say, though, that the ten years between age ten and
twenty were an eternity, spent in a depressed netherworld. “Time
flies when you’re having fun” — well, the converse is
true as well. When you’re unhappy, time drags by. Now that I’m
in recovery from alcoholism and from depression, I’m having fun, and
time does fly. As for the effects of the medication, I will say simply that
it was like stepping out of the black-and-white world of a cemetery at
night into a world of trees and sun and full color.
I want you to know, however, that medication did not
cure my alcoholism. I was still tempted by alcohol and my street-drug
substitutes for alcohol in the early months of sobriety. I knew that I was
still powerless over alcohol, and with time and more meetings, I could see
more and more clearly that my life was unmanageable. Medication did not do
my Second and Third Steps for me, either. I came to believe in a power
greater than myself and of my own understanding after I got to Step Twelve,
when I had that spiritual awakening as the result of having worked Steps
Ten and Eleven on a daily basis for some time. That’s just how it
worked for me.
Medication also did not give me the power I’ve
found in the inventory process described in Steps Four through Seven.
Medication couldn’t make me a moral person nor turn me into a person
who sought to better himself. Medication didn’t free me from my past,
either. After I completed my Ninth Step amends for the first time, I felt
the burden of shame and guilt lifted from me. I really could look myself in
the eye and know that I no longer needed to feel bad about what I had done
because now I was the new me. Finally, medication didn’t give me the
power to live day to day, taking life as it comes, the good with the bad.
AA has given me the ability to live through the good times and the bad
times.
A person may wonder why I needed medication if AA did
all these things for me. All I can say is, be glad that you can’t
relate. Just know that I’m not unique, that there will be other AA
members here and there who have got something wrong with them the way I had
something wrong with me.
In June 1995, I stopped taking the medication I’d
been on for fifteen months. I haven’t returned to medication, a
therapist’s care — or depression. I’ve had self-pity in
sobriety, I’ve had the blues, I’ve been beat down, homesick and
heartbroken, envious and sad, angry and lonely, and really irritated that I
have to play by the same rules everybody else has to play by. But
I’ve never had to return to depression, as I knew it. And I thank AA
for keeping me on the path that leads away from depression.
Thank goodness I fell in with the right group of AA
members back in 1993. They didn’t tell me that seeing a psychiatrist
represented “half-measures.” They didn’t tell me that I
wasn’t really sober because I took medication. Instead, they told me
that I should see the psychiatrist and follow his advice — and come
to meetings, don’t drink, get a sponsor, read the Big Book, and do
the Steps.
Looking back on my early sobriety in that small college
town in southwestern Ohio, I remember the old-timers as no-nonsense,
by-the-book AA members. It was in that group that I learned the difference
between sharing my opinion at an AA meeting and sharing my personal
experience. At that group, I’d seen older members say things like,
“What page did you read that on?” when they thought another
member was saying nonsense. I also heard, “How many alcoholics have
you killed with that advice?”
I don’t know why I had the kind of mental illness
that is fixed by a pill. I don’t know why I got to live when so many
others killed themselves. I don’t know how to distinguish, at a
glance, the people who need medication from those who are just looking for
an “easier, softer way.” It seems like the whole nation is on
antidepressants now. But I’m not a professional. I only have my
personal experience as I have lived it. I don’t know how to make
anyone be honest or work the Steps. All I know is that when I saw AA, I
wanted it. I believed those people were happy and enjoying their lives, and
I wanted it for myself, too, and I never stopped coming back.
Gerald G.
Tempe, Arizona
|
